Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at the LSE. A child of Russian emigres, he grew up in the notorious Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago and studied as a cellist. After injuring his hand, he turned to academia. Author of many books, including The Craftsman and The Culture of the New Capitalism, his latest, Together, looks at social co-operation in diverse communities.

You argue that we are losing the impulse to co-operate with people who are different from ourselves - what you call "the intractable Other". But isn't the impulse strengthening with greater migration and diversity?

I wouldn't say that the impulse to co-operation is weakening but that it's being deformed. The increase in inequality means the distance between social classes is growing greater. I'd say the issue for Britain is the same for a lot of ethnically layered societies. What you get is indifference as a way of managing difference. People keep to their own turf, not a complex social tapestry that mixes people together.

Is multiculturalism really about alienation and indifference rather than co-operation and solidarity?

Absolutely. I've had colleagues who've traced this in the lives of schoolchildren. At six or seven, they're interleaved with each other; by the time they're 14 it's like a chemical separation – no longer speaking to people with different colour and accents. When they have to deal with each other they are at a loss.

We hear a lot about community, but what does community mean to you?

What it doesn't mean to me is just a place to sleep. I'm struck in Britain that when people talk about community action they're talking about an old-fashioned idea of where people have their homes. But the most important thing is the workplace. Workplace communities are getting weaker and weaker. Modern capitalism doesn't encourage much interaction because it's highly stratifying. Once you stop thinking about where you sleep, the whole issue of community takes on a different kind of character.

You think the "big society" is a form of "economic colonialism". Why?

Well, it's sort of obvious, isn't it? It's a kind of colonial mentality. We're not going to give; we're going to ask you to become self-sufficient, a Bantustan. If you really want to have a society of people volunteering to work in libraries, the libraries have to be open. It's a self-evident contradiction. Look at the first impulse: to save money to make the bankers happy.

Is there such a thing as responsible capitalism?

There can be more or less responsible capitalism. I think the Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians have a more responsible capitalism than we do in Britain. They've managed to combine social need with robust economies. And they've made a much better job of training skilled manual labourers.

What's more important, equality of opportunity or outcome?

It's a false question. Think about what equality of opportunity means – one in 20 in a class gets to go to Oxbridge. In other words, meritocratic, skimming off the cream. What happens to the other 19? It's a kind of lie about what equality means – that we should think about creating a means of escape and neglect the rest. I'm more interested in how to get the 19 up to scratch. Meritocratic searches create an enormous amount of peer hostility. The thing that most angered me about New Labour was this talk of meritocracy.

Tell me about your history on the left.

I've had a rather strange political trajectory. I started out an enraged youth in the 1960s, then the cliches of the counterculture got to me so much that I became a centrist, kind of apolitical in the 70s and early 1980s. Then I started moving left again in my 40s, when I started to do interviews with workers in the new economy, high-finance services. It renewed my left-wing politics. I really believe in bottom-up politics, but I understand that it might not produce much political change.

You spent a part of childhood, while you were studying music, living in the Chicago projects of Cabrini Green. Was that difficult?

Actually the musical part of it was fine. I wasn't singled out for harassment because musicians in black culture are held in great esteem. But there was a kind of racial warfare. I just thought that was the way life was. My mother was doing party work, trying to organise black women. She thought the black proletariat were the last and best hope of communism. It sounds absurd to say it, yet people really believed that.

Why did you turn to writing novels in the 1980s?

I felt I had nothing more to say as a sociologist, so it was an experiment. One of them is OK – Palais-Royale. I enjoyed it but it's not me.

Are you able to play music these days?

I'm able to play a bit. I had some reconstructive hand surgery. I'm not very good any more. I've found this group of very tolerant musicians in London, which is great. It's such a gift to be able to play again.

You used to write a food column for the Spectator. How important is cooking to you?

I'm a physical person and l like physical things. When I lost the use of my hand in music I wanted to do something every day that was a contact with physical reality, even though I had only one functional hand: that was cooking. It gives me enormous physical pleasure. I'm not that good a cook – well, I'm OK. I like to eat bourgeois French and Italian cooking. My favourite restaurant is the River Cafe. Rose Gray was a great, great cook and Ruth Rogers is no slouch either.

You were friends with the celebrated and late French intellectual Michel Foucault. What was he like?

He was a great friend to me and his other friends. I know he was very forbidding to the public. You read about all the drugs and the sex, which was part of him, but it's kind of an external portrait, trying to make him into a Nietzschean man. He was also a very sweet, domestic person, a wonderful cook. He and his boyfriend grew tomatoes in between their marijuana plants.

You emphasise the importance of dialogical thinking in your book. What is it?

It's really a focus on how to listen to what people mean but they don't say, how to draw people out. To me that's really the foundation of complex co-operation. It's being able to attend to someone else without identifying yourself in them. It's about how to be curious about other people.